783 » The Awesome Opportunities Still Out There For Airbnb… It’s Not Too Late with Brian Page

Joe: Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast.

Joe: Hey everybody, welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast and we’re in for a special treat today. I’m glad you’re here. This is the first time actually in a while that I’ve done an audio-only podcast and it brings back a lot of fond memories. Normally I’m looking at a camera and myself on videos. This is kind of nice… back to old school. Back to the audio-only podcast. I’m glad you’re here, guys.

I wanted to do a quick little interview with a guest that we’ve had on before, talking about Airbnb. I’m telling you guys, you know, I have this product that I teach people how to do lease options and I get tons of people that send me these testimonials of how they used a lease option to get a property under contract. And instead of just putting a tenant buyer in it and renting it out, they’re turning them into Airbnbs and they’re making a bunch more money.

Joe: I mean, I’m talking like instead of having just like a $200, $300 a month in cashflow, they’re doing like $2,000 to $3,000 a month in cash flow. So there’s just, it’s a game changer and there’s a lot of things that’s been changing in the industry. You hear all of these horror stories about how, you know, it’s illegal to do it now in all of these cities, which it’s just not true. But I wanted to get Brian back on the podcast again cause I’m gonna be doing another webinar with him soon. This is something that I really am passionate about. I want people to hear it.

Like, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you didn’t hear that last podcast I did with Brian, that’s fine. Like, I wanted to get him back on because I know I’ve got a lot of new listeners here and just talk about kind of the state of the industry, talk about anything that’s updated or changed in the last few months… why Airbnb is still such a game change, is still such a profitable business. And also, how big it is worldwide. I mean like the United States is just a small percentage of it, right? It’s like insane when you hear these numbers.

But Brian is in the, he’s deep into it. He’s in the trenches, he’s doing them himself. Hear his stories about how he’s buying these little properties like in these blue-collar neighborhoods, not in the areas where, you know, it’s very, it’s like it’s a luxury vacation area of your city… it’s like normal neighborhoods. He’s doing these Airbnbs in these normal neighborhoods and making a bunch of money on that.

So before I invite Brian on, I just want to say guys, you can go get all the show notes at realestateinvestingmastery.com or reimpodcast.com and get the show notes, get the transcriptions, we’re going to give you links, we’re going to give you notes and if you wants some… you don’t want to have to remember writing it down and all that, you can get all the show notes and the transcripts at realestateinvestingmastery.com. Go there and get that. And also, don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review in iTunes. We’d really appreciate it. Okay, cool.

Joe: Mr. Brian Page, how are you my man?

Brian: Joe, good to be here, man. Good to be here.

Joe: Thanks. Thanks for, you know, being patient with my long-winded intro there. I appreciate that.

Brian: No, not at all. I actually want to share everybody with a funny story with them if I could. You know, you and I have been connected for a while, but uh, I was on a flight a while back.

Joe: Yeah, this is funny.

Brian: I don’t remember what it was. I sat down in my chair and looked to my left and there you are looking at me. That was the first time we’d ever met face to face and you’re like, Brian Page. I’m like, uh, I know you? And you’re like, I’m Joe, Joe McCall. I was like, Oh man! I’d never actually seen you face to face. So that was really a treat. We had a good talk and, and connected on that flight.

Joe: It was a nice flight. I think… why were we even on, though? Was it coming back after Funnel Hacking Live, maybe? Is that what it was?

Brian: It was, it was Funnel Hacking Live in Nashville. Yup.

Joe: Yes. And so, you’re in Charleston, South Carolina, right? Cool town. Really nice place. I was there six, eight months ago or was it a year ago? I was with a mutual friend of already, he has a little mastermind and that’s a great place. So, you’ve been, um, you’ve been really active.

You know, you’ve got an amazing course on Airbnb. It’s kind of taking the world by storm. You’re doing really, really well. You’re getting like, I mean, it’s just, to hear some of the stories you’re telling me of people that you’re rubbing shoulders with now. Uh, that’s just really, really cool to see you exploding, your business really going well. You’re still in the trenches doing Airbnbs yourself, which is so cool to hear about.

So, talk about what’s been going on with you, uh, on the business side of things… the last, you know, six, eight months since we talked last on this podcast.

Brian: Oh my gosh, there’s so much. Well as far as me personally, yeah, I’ve been meeting a lot of my heroes, I guess… people that I followed for a long time. I just got to meet Grant Cardone in person and we are working on a deal right now together on some of his units because he’s got about, I think he said 500 vacant units in his portfolio. So, it gives you an idea how big his portfolio is. And we’re talking to him about turning some of those into Airbnbs and start monetizing as vacant units. So that was cool.

And I have been buying properties, I’m back into acquiring properties again, this time with no debt. I don’t, I don’t like debt. And so, I’m buying these little junkers for cash and we can talk about that.

Joe: I’m sure that was a, a great conversation with Grant Cardone, right?

Brian: Oh yeah. He said, why in the world would you ever buy property with cash? I was like, oh, because I’ve experienced the real estate crash and I just not interested in doing that anymore. And of course, he’s a big proponent of using debt to, to leverage and buy, but, uh, to each his own. So, you know, I’ve been getting into that a little bit.

And the thing I’m most excited about though is the results that my students are getting. Cause now we have even more incredible stories coming out of different parts of the world of these students that are doing Airbnb for themselves. And that’s really what I love talking about the most.

Joe: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. You know, like what percentage of Airbnb’s business is in the United States?

Brian: Uh, most people don’t realize this, but it’s only a quarter. So, three out of every four listings are overseas. It’s insane. It’s insane. And the growth is, you know, just exploding in other countries where they’re just now getting introduced to Airbnb.

Joe: Oh Man. Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. So, talk about some of these stories you’ve had. Well, what are some, um, some students that I’ve heard you talk about, some stay at home moms that are just crushing it right now. What are some other stories that you’d like to talk and tell about?

Brian: Well, one of my students out on the west coast, she has, uh, last time I talked to her, interviewed her, she had five properties, but now she has 10 and she’s been doing this for I think about little over a year. And she told me that she’s bringing in about $350,000 in the last 12 months in bookings. And the cool thing that she’s doing is she’s doing the no lease method. So, she’s never signed the lease on any of these 10 properties.

And on top of that, she’s found a way to make money by staging the property. So, she tells the owner, well, you know, if I’m going to do this with you, I have to stage the place and I charge $5,000 to stage a property and then she puts a package together for them.

Joe: So, she’s charging, she’s making the owner pay for that. Isn’t that awesome?

Brian: Well, she loves decorating. And you know, for those of you who love decorating and staging homes, I mean you’ve got a side business because people are going to need that service in order to turn their property into an Airbnb. So, she makes money there. She makes money on the cash flow. She has no leases to sign, no deposits, no first month’s rent and no furnishings.

So, she’s basically found a multiple six figure business through my, when I teach and she, she’s in her twenties and her background is, she was a bartender and a college dropout. So that’s just one of many stories that I get from people that are doing this. Um, you know, all different ages, young teenagers all the way up to seventies people that are trying to retire that need a retirement income. So, it’s really, really exciting to see that really.

Brian: And I’d say the vast majority of them, Joe, are not real estate investors. I know people listening right now are real estate investors, but a lot of people that are doing this have no business, no background in real estate.

Joe: Wow. Okay. So, give us another story.

Brian: Okay. Um, gosh, there’s so many stories. Let’s see here. Um, there is a young kid that’s up in Chicago, he is working on… I think he’s got about eight listings and he just raised half a million dollars from a hedge fund that wants to fund all of his Airbnb’s. He’s doing so well with Airbnbs that now he’s gotten major money backing him to go get more listings. So, he’s expanding like crazy.

And then, you know, then there’s just countless hundreds of students that have got just one or two listings, which is really exciting. You know, people that are making an extra thousand to $3,000 a month, very, very part time with a couple of listings.

Joe: And people I think get intimidated, don’t they, of the management aspect of this? Right? They’re like, Oh man, this is going to be, like, I’m going to get calls in the middle of the night that the internet’s not working or I’m going to have to go in and clean the house myself every time somebody leaves and they’re going to leave it a disaster and a mess. Talk about why that’s not exactly…

Brian: Well, you know, when I first started getting involved with Airbnb years ago, it was a nightmare to try to manage everything. There was no system. In fact, I was looking online, I was going on YouTube, I was searching everywhere I could to find a system to manage all my bnbs and there was really nothing. There was nobody teaching anything, there was no courses, there was nothing.

And so, I kind of had to come up with it on my own and I came up with a system whereby I can outsource pretty much all of the day to day operations. So, I don’t have to talk to the guests. I certainly don’t clean properties; I don’t have to worry about when things go wrong or somebody messaging me at one in the morning or any of that stuff.

So that’s really the name of the game because if you don’t automate it, then you’re going to be running your own hotel. And that takes a lot of time and effort. So that’s really what I specialize in is not just getting the properties but automating completely the business so you can step back and, and really manage your portfolio with just a few hours a week.

Joe: And there’s companies out there right now that help you manage these properties. They help you clean them and every major city has those. Good.

Brian: Oh yeah, it’s an entire ecosystem that’s sprung up. There are, there are tons of companies now that rely entirely on Airbnb and they, they do everything from managing your cleanings to full on property management for your Airbnbs. They do it all. And so that’s really, really exciting for people that, that want to do that. Cause last thing I want to hear is somebody, you know, went out, got a couple of these properties and now they, they are running ragged trying to manage them and, and that’s not what I’m into. It’s not what I teach.

Joe: You’re going to love this. I have a friend at church and um, good guy, hard worker. He tried wholesaling and really struggled with it. Right? It was just, it just didn’t click for him.

Brian: It’s challenging. I’ve tried it. It’s challenging.

Joe: Yeah. And so, he just took a job with a property management company and he got his license and he, I don’t know what he does for this property management company, but he works for them. And I was talking to him and seeing how it’s going. You know, it’s going good. It’s a steady paycheck. He likes it. And I said, you know what you should do, you should become the resident Airbnb expert for your property management company. And he said, what do you mean?

I said, well go get Brian’s course and just watch it. Learn how to do Airbnbs. And um, you have a lot of clients that you’re working for that, you know, you could maybe like propose to them, cause you’re getting maybe eight to 10% on each deal. Right? Well what if you proposed to some of your clients with these vacant houses—Hey, listen, before we put a tenant in there let’s maybe do an Airbnb on this and um, you know, get a bigger percentage of the profits. The seller will make more money. You’ll make more money. And he thought, okay, that’s interesting. And he did it.

Joe: About six months later he came back to me and said, Joe, that is amazing. That was like the best advice you’ve ever given me. I couldn’t get into all the details with him at the time, but um, needless to say, he is super busy with that right now. He was so excited. And you think about it, this property management company has like probably a couple hundred clients and each of them maybe have two or three homes. So, they have maybe close to a thousand properties that they’re managing and uh, he, he’s taken that and run with it doing really, really well. He was super excited.

Brian: That’s great. Yeah. Property managers can do well with this and realtors do really well because they have the inside scoop on places that are coming up for lease, places that are for sale that say aren’t selling on the market. And you can approach those owners and say, look, your property hasn’t sold in the last year, year and a half, why don’t you turn it into a bnb and let me manage it?

So, there’s a lot of opportunity for realtors, property managers, and then also investors. Anybody who’s an investor has a leg up because you already know how to talk to owners. You already know how to find deals. You know how to do bird dog, you know, have bird dogs out there finding deals for you, which I talk about in my course. And people were like, what’s, what is a bird dog? And I’m like, well you can use that to find Airbnb properties as well. So, there’s all kinds of, a lot of the things that I use are the same things I learned as a real estate investor.

Joe: That’s true. A lot of people, Brian, think, you know, did I miss the Airbnb wave? Isn’t it like too late to get into this? Um, aren’t there too many people doing this? What about competition? And I, you know, no matter what type of real estate you’re doing, you hear this all the time. But would you talk about that? Like do you, can you only do lease options in the nicer vacation areas or can you do them in other parts of the city where there’s maybe not as many restrictions and stuff like that?

Brian: Oh, that’s a good question. So, I get that a lot too. And it’s every month or every year that I teach this, people say the same thing, oh, it’s getting too saturated, or maybe it’s not going to work in my area or whatever. And what we finding is that the growth on Airbnb, the number of people that are traveling for the first time on Airbnb is exploding. It’s growing year over year, every single year.

And if you doubt me, just ask 10 of your friends, have you traveled using Airbnb? And you’d be surprised how many people say no, they’re aware of Airbnb, but they haven’t actually tried it. Yeah, that’s what we’re finding. And that’s what the studies find is that there’s a lot of people that still have not used, even though there’s a lot of awareness out there. So, the growth is outstripping the supply in almost every market.

Brian: And that’s still true. And, and also quite frankly, it doesn’t really matter what other people are doing. Cause the things that I teach allow you to stand on top of all the competition and just clean up. Because on Airbnb, almost everybody on the site is amateur. Almost everybody on the site has no concept of how to market their property, how to photograph it, how to do the descriptions, how to stage it, any of those things that, that give you a higher, um, value that you can charge per night for your listing. So, so no, I’m not worried about competition.

And the other thing is that’s a big misconception is that you have to be in a tourist destination like Charleston or you have to be in a big city or you have to be near something interesting. And I found that’s just not the case. I’ve got students in very, very small towns like under a thousand people that are doing well, many students under 10,000 population towns. And I’ve got people in the most boring suburbs in the middle of Nowhereville that are doing extremely well.

Brian: I just went down to Dallas and met one of my students down there that has six listings. He’s doing a healthy six figure plus business and he’s in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. And I went to his house and it was a nondescript house in a nondescript neighborhood in the middle of a giant Metro area of Dallas. And he’s doing really well. And I was like, who comes here? And he’s like, I don’t know, but my house is always full. So, um, so it’s a big misconception and I’ve proven it.

I decided to go into the cheapest, cheapest neighborhood that I could find in my metro area and get a house just to prove that it will work, even in the, uh, the roughest neighborhood and that’s what I’ve been getting into lately.

Joe: Because guys, you don’t realize how many people are coming in from out of town to visit family, maybe go to the hospital to visit some friends, uh, or you know, or just like they’re there, they’re wanting to go see a ballgame and they don’t want to stay in downtown where it’s going to cost them $300 a night in a hotel. So, they’re looking for little Airbnbs and if it’s 20, 30 minutes away, that’s okay.

Brian: So true. That’s so true. I had a person reach out to me and he said, Brian, I live in a town of 5,000 off Highway 95. There’s nothing here. And I said, well, let me ask you if there’s this there, is there a hotel there? And he said, actually, there’s a couple of hotels near the highway. And I said, well, are they in business? Are they out of business? He said, they’re in business. I said, well then somebody staying in those hotels, why couldn’t they stay in your Airbnb? Somebody needs a place to stay. So, he, he said, all right, I’ll try it. And he did it.

He got a listing and he’s doing extremely well. I think he’s making like $1,300 a month on this first listing that he got in a little town in the middle of nowhere, you know, on 95 so that’s the point, that there are people traveling short term anywhere there’s a hotel. And we’re doing the same thing, except we’re doing it probably cheaper on Airbnb. And we give somebody, for example, a whole house, like my houses go for $100, $150 a night, which is about what hotel room goes for here, except they’re getting a three-bedroom house.

Joe: Well, here’s the crazy thing. I went to Ames, Iowa, I think in the… actually Ankeny, Iowa. And I don’t know if anybody’s heard of Ankeny. If you have the, you’re probably from Iowa or you live there. Right? And I’m looking now at Ankeny Iowa on Airbnb. Guess how many houses there are there in Ankeny. Like, I’m counting 10.

Brian: Yeah, on Airbnb. Yeah.

Joe: On Airbnb, right. Just 10. And it’s, you know, it’s a suburb kind of farther away from Des Moines. Well, here’s the crazy thing, I’m there with my four kids and we need a place to stay because I don’t want, I don’t like getting two rooms at a hotel. And the thing, the cheapest thing I could find was a like $175. And so, like it stunk to pay that. Right. But at the same time I’m like, oh my gosh, look at it. I mean like Ankeny was not the tourist destination, people. People don’t fly from uh, from San Diego to come do a vacation in Ankeny, Iowa. But Joe McCall does when he’s coming down to visit his family for a couple of days. And I also had a dog, right? So, we had to bring our dog with us. But uh, you know, we had the dog in a kennel, so I wasn’t looking for places that allowed dogs.

Joe: I was shocked at how few inventory, few houses there were and then how much I was paying. And this wasn’t just a house where the people moved out because they were getting a guest. This was a house that this is a fulltime Airbnb for them. And it was a nice house. It was really good. But like, I was thinking there is so much opportunity here. It’s, it’s amazing. And you don’t have to live in Ankeny Iowa either, right? Like you can, if you lived in St Louis, Missouri, I could start doing Airbnbs in Ankeny, Iowa if I wanted to, couldn’t I?

Brian: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got many students that are going across state lines. They’re going across, uh, to other metro areas. I mean, there’s potential if you want to go long distance, you could certainly do that. Uh, all you gotta do is have somebody good on the ground there. They can be your eyes and ears for the property and then you can have everything managed in the system just the same way that I teach.

So yeah, you can go to other areas. You don’t need to. I tell people start in your niche, in your local area first, learn how the methods work and how Airbnb works, and then you can look at expanding into other areas. And that’s the truth. Yeah, there are so many people, especially as you go out into the medium and small cities and towns there, there’s really just not as many Airbnbs. And that just makes sense because it’s a smaller population.

Brian: But in the big cities, I had somebody challenge me one time, they’re like, Brian, I live in, I don’t remember where it was. I think it was somewhere in Texas. I don’t know if it was Fort Worth or Dallas or somewhere. And they said, look, there are like 1,000,002 million people in this area. And I went on Airbnb and there are like thousands of listings. And I said, well wait a second, let me get this straight for a second. So, they were worried about too many listings.

I said, so you’re saying that there’s a couple thousand listings in a metro area with 2 million, so, so how many people travel to your town every day? And we looked up the, the number was something like several million people, cause like several million people come to Charleston every year. And I said, so all those of people traveling to your area and there’s only 2000 listings, it sounds like there’s an opportunity there and so it’s all relative, right? The number of listings for the population size. The point is that yeah, there’s a demand, there’s a demand for people that want a new way to travel.

Joe: I went to Google, did a search in Ankeny, Iowa on the maps. Right. And then I just searched for hotels. There are 15 hotels in Ankeny, Iowa. There you go. 15 and you know what these prices are? Oh my Gosh, $123, $179, $220 a night.

Brian: I’m going to guess, Joe, you get a whole single-family home with three or four bedrooms for that on Airbnb. Easy.

Joe: Okay. And that’s a such a great point you brought up. Even in a small town like Ankeny, you’re going to get, you get, there’s 15 hotels there and there’s a super small inventory of homes.

Brian: All right, so let’s do the, let’s do the numbers really quick. I want to show people this example. So, we’ll take that city. I’ve never been there and never even heard of it. Let’s say we were to have a house there, a three-bedroom house, and we were going to charge 150 a night and we get only 20 days in the month booked, which is not 30 just 20… that’s $3,000 a month. I don’t know what it costs to buy a house in that area, but if you own a house in that area, for example, you know what your mortgage is, maybe it’s $1,200 maybe it’s less, I don’t know, but you’re bringing in $3,000 and that’s just a number I just plucked out and it’s right in the middle of those values.

So that gives you an idea that if you could lease a place, let’s say for 800 or a thousand bucks and make $3000 in Airbnb, or you owned it and you can put it on Airbnb and make $3000 I mean, you could maybe make a lot more than that, but that’s just based on the $150 figure. So, you get the idea, this is how simple it is to do.

Joe: Well, I’m looking right now on Zillow. I looked at some rentals in Ankeny and I’m sorting them by payment low to high. And there’s some nice houses in here for $950 a month.

Brian: There you go. I was guessing about a thousand bucks.

Joe: Yeah. $950 a month. Some really nice homes. I’m just looking at like, okay, this would be good curb appeal. This would be a good picture. Maybe $1100 a month.

Brian: So, let’s say it was $1,000, Joe, let’s say it’s $1,000 and $300 for utilities roughly. Let’s say that’s $1,300… my numbers might be a little bit off. Who Cares? $1,300. What if we could bring in $2,600 on Airbnb? So that’s 1300 cashflow in our pocket on a little rental that we have. That’s, that’s being very conservative by the way, when you’re talking about doubling the revenue, doubling your costs to get the revenue. So, $1,300 a month cash flow in your pocket, even if I’m off by a hundred bucks here or there, that, that’s the kind of potential you have.

Joe: So, you could get about 150 a night rent on this, right? I’m looking at your calculator. By the way, your property, I’m going to give away this property profits calculator if that’s okay with you, Brian.

Brian: Sure, sure.

Joe: And it’ll be at realestateinvestingmastery.com. Just look up this episode here and it’s a calculator you created where you can, uh, put in the rent that you’re paying for the property and then the weekday rates and the weekend rates. So, let’s say, uh, could we could do $150 for a weekday, $200 for weekend rate. Okay. And then, uh, for occupancy rate, what’s a good one? Could you be conservative and do 70%?

Brian: Yeah, the average, I would say the average is about 65% nationwide. So do 65 just to be conservative.

Joe: All right. 65% and now we’re paying, I just found one of these houses on Zillow that’s $1100 a month. Okay. Alright. Nice. Cute house, $1100 a month. I figure for utilities, let’s just do $50 for water, $50 for power, $20 for Internet.

Brian: And by the way, while Joe’s doing this, my software, what it does, it takes out what Airbnb charges you cause they charge you fees and it takes out if you wanted to hire somebody else to manage your bnb so that you get a real net, you get an actual net and dollar what you’re going to make.

Joe: All right, so let’s say on my weekday, this is a, I’m looking here… It’s a four. It’s a, um, it’s a three bedroom, one and a half baths. About 1200 square foot, looks really nice. And, uh, and my calculator here, I got $1100 that I’m paying in rent, 50 bucks for water, 50 Bucks for power, 30 bucks for Internet, 10 bucks for streaming and 50 bucks for gas. Like, um, what do you call it? Natural gas. Weekday rate of a, let’s just say 140 weekday rate.

Brian: Yeah, let’s do it. Great. Let’s go conservative on the weekend. Maybe 170…

Joe: 170 on the weekend. All right. 65% occupancy, which should, that’s easy to beat…

Brian: That’s low, by the way, that’s very low for my students. That’s low.

Joe: So that’s like national average. But Brian, I, I guys, I’m telling you, I have one student, Brian, I know, I think I told you before. Laina B, she got her first lease option deal. She, um, she’s paying the seller $1465 a month in rent for this property, which is what market rent is. And within four days she had um, she had $1,450 in booking fees in four days. She’s covering her rent in the first four days, which is crazy.

So, we’re figuring out here… 65% occupancy. You’re looking at your, your net cashflow per year of $16,860. let’s just raise the occupancy to 70% that’s $19,344 net annual cashflow, about $1,600 a month.

Brian: You know how hard people work for that kind of money. I mean some people, you know, think about if you’re making $40,000 a year, this is half of your income. This is half of your salary and I’ll tell you how long it takes to manage one little B Airbnb. It takes no time. It really doesn’t. So, it’s amazing. It’s an amazing way to create cashflow.

Joe: Looking at this cashflow, this calculator again, if I had five of these properties, my net net net annual cashflow, and that’s your taking out rent, utilities, Airbnb fees, management fees, everything, right? Is $96,720. if I did five of those properties, my annual net net net cashflow is 97,000.

Brian: That is about average. If you look at my students, all of my students who are doing six figures plus, and I’ve got a bunch of them, they usually get about five listings to get to $100,000 in net. And the only thing that’s not on that calculator that I wanted to mention in case anybody calls me out and says, well wait a second, Brian. Their cleaning fees are not on there. And the reason they’re not on there is because the cleaning fees are charged to the guest in addition to the booking fees.

Brian: So, let’s say your cleaning company wants a hundred bucks to clean it up, then you charge $100. Actually, I like charge $110 to the guest at the time they book. So, I don’t put that in the calculator because I’m not paying it. The guest is paying it and then I just charge a little bit extra $10 that covers the toilet paper, the soap and the shampoo and the coffee and all the things I’m going to give them for free. So that’s kind of how, why it’s not in the calculator, but yeah, every single thing is, it’s figured in. So, you know that that number on the software that Joe is gonna provide is accurate.

Joe: Oh yeah. And that’s important to understand because, um, the sellers pay for that. I mean, I stay at an Airbnb a lot and they advertise it as 50 bucks a night, but then after you go through and you pay for it, it’s like, whoa. Right. But yeah, that closing, sometimes they take a deposit. Sometimes if it’s a long enough visit, sometimes you pay extra closing, cleaning fees and stuff like that. But it still is way better than a hotel. Like when you’ve got a family, like I do, you know, way better than a hotel and many times cheaper.

Joe: So, a couple things… I want to ask you a few more questions, Brian, but I want to tell people, because I know a lot of you guys are interested, okay, how do I get more information? How do I learn how to do this? Brian and I are doing a special webinar and if you go to REIMpodcast.com/brian—r e i m—that’s for Real Estate Investing Mastery. REIMpodcast.com/brian, you’ll get some information on this webinar that we’re going to be doing real soon here.

So, um, I wanted to ask you two more questions. You’re starting to see the furnishings, right? The furnishings. People are thinking, man, that’s, I’ll have to go… And it must cost a lot of money to buy all of this furniture and stage it. What’s a realistic budget maybe for furnishing a house and what are some ways they can save money doing that?

Brian: Okay, well when I got my first listing, it was unfurnished, so I had to pay to furnish it. Then I got smart and said, why don’t, why am I not just looking for furnished properties? So, then I started looking for furnished properties and that’s what I find first. I’m always looking for furnished places. So, if you do that, then your costs are, you know, almost nothing. You might have to put in a couple of things like, you know, say soap and shampoo and some extra towels and those kinds of things. So, the cost is very low if it’s furnished.

Now, if it’s not furnished, the rule of thumb is, is two to three times the rent. So, if your rent is $1000, it’s going to cost you $2,000 to $3,000 to furnish the unit. And that’s based on used furniture. I tell people, do not ever buy new furniture. It’s the biggest rip off in the world. And nowadays with platforms like Facebook marketplace and Offer Up and all these apps that are out there, you can, or Craigslist or whatever, you can find gently used furniture for next to nothing and you can make stupid low offers on stuff.

Brian: So, I’ll go on Facebook marketplace and I see a bunch of couches that I like and I just make half price offers on them. Hey, I’ll give you 200 for that $400 couch. And I get people to say yes. So, I get like a nearly new piece of furniture and that way I’m not buying new stuff so I don’t buy new stuff. And so yeah, it would cost you, in $1,000 unit, for example, two to three grand. And so, all in you might need five grand to get a lease. And so that’s, that’s very small money in the real estate world for real estate investors.

Obviously, we know that’s not a lot of money, but if you don’t have any money, then I strongly suggest that you partner with the owner and you partner on a furnished property and then you’re in the door with no money. You’re just approaching them and saying, let me take some photos, I’ll have it up on Airbnb in the next couple of days and we’ll split everything.

Joe: Hmm. You know, the cool thing about that too is yeah, your first deal, you might need some money for that. You can always find somebody to partner with you on that deal. But once you start doing these, you’re just going to save you a little bit of your cashflow so that next time you do your next deal, you’re going to have that cash reserved, saved to do this yourself really quickly. So just reinvest some of your profits after you do your first one to buy furniture on your next one and be smart about it.

Okay. Last question I have for you Brian. I’m in some markets that are really kind of clamping down on Airbnb. So, what do you say to somebody who’s in like San Diego, San Francisco, New York, you know, some of these bigger cities, Nashville, Denver, where they’re really cracking down and making it difficult?

Brian: Okay, great. Well, this was one of those questions I got from all kinds of people all over the U.S. I’m going to talk to U.S. people here because internationally, uh, it’s a whole other thing. And it’s usually less regulated internationally. But in the U.S., there are some towns and cities that don’t allow home sharing or they’re strongly, uh, are against, you know, that make it difficult to do there.

And this is because Airbnb is a disruptor. It’s just the same way Uber is disrupting taxis and Amazon is, you know, putting all these big brick and mortar stores out of business. The same thing with Airbnb. It’s a disruptor, especially with the hotel industry. And so, in cities where you have very powerful hotel lobbies and hotel industries, for example, in New York, San Francisco, bigger cities, you’re going to find there’s a lot of opposition to home sharing. And a lot of that comes from the hotel industry.

Brian: So, what we did is I decided, instead of guessing what was going on out there, I wanted to find out for sure. So, I hired a research firm and we did six months’ worth of research to look at every single town and city in the U.S., over 30,000 people. And just so you know, that’s a list of 2,000 towns and cities. It’s a big list. And we made that list and then we classified those towns into different categories and found out how many of them don’t allow home sharing. And what we found that was really interesting is that nine out of 10 towns/cities do allow home sharing and one in 10 do not.

So, if you live in one of those one in 10 places, let me give you some examples. If you live in New York, proper New York City, you live in San Francisco, you live in Atlanta for example, Atlanta, the city, not Atlanta, the area, then they’re very restrictive if not completely unallowed in those areas.

Brian: But the interesting thing is, we have students in all those cities that are doing really well. So, I contacted some of them and I said, how are you guys doing this? How would you have five listings in San Francisco? And they answer was, well, um, I just get listings around the city. Like that’s what I did. I’ve done, like if you look at Atlanta for example, Atlanta’s made up of many towns that make up the metro area. And so, my students in Atlanta just don’t get them in downtown Atlanta.

And so, we tell people to go around and there are some rulebreakers though, and we found that some people are operating in the, in these red cities despite the rules, because there’s no enforcement. So, we found 50% of towns that don’t allow home sharing do not even enforce the rules at all. So that’s really interesting. I’m not telling you to break the rules, but do with that information, what you like.

And then the final thing I want to say is it’s no different than any other type of real estate. Um, you have to go where it’s zoned. So, if you’re going to open a hair salon, you wouldn’t do that in a residential neighborhood. If you’re going to live somewhere, you’re not going to live in a, in a storefront. You got to live in a residential area.

So, the same thing, you’re going to go where the opportunity is and 99% of people you could drive 20 or 30 minutes, be in a different municipality, a different town and there it’s completely allowed with no restrictions. So that’s what I tell my students to do. Get in your car, drive. If it’s, you know, frowned upon in your particular town or your particular backyard, who cares? Go, go where it’s allowed. And that’s the same thing in Charleston.

Brian: Charleston proper has made it very difficult to do Airbnb, but every town and city around the metro, Charleston Metro area, not a problem. And those are the areas in which I operate. So, rest assured, no matter where you are, you can do this.

Joe: That’s good. You really can. And you can do deals virtually. It’s not, it’s not that hard. Okay. So, um, how can people get more information? We’re going to do a webinar together. Um, as we’re recording this, will be in a couple of weeks, but if you want more information on this webinar that I’m going to be doing with Brian, just go to this link right now and register for it. REIMpodcast.com/Brian. REIMpodcast.com/Brian. That stands for RealEstateInvestingMasterypodcast.com and you get some more information about this webinar that I’m doing.

Joe: If you’re on my email list, you’re going to be getting tons of emails about it, I promise, because I think this is so important to understand. This is a really, um, important challenge that people need to learn how to overcome. Cashflow, right? Like if you want to make more monthly cashflow, there’s such a thing as streams of cash and piles of cash, right? You need to have both. You need to have the piles of cash you get from wholesaling and flipping deals, right? Yeah. You also need streams of cash to tide you over when you’re piles of cash are running low. You know what I’m saying? So cashflow’s the name of the game. This is a secret to real wealth.

I want to encourage you guys to get this and you can get the calculator. If you go to RealEstateInvestingMasterypodcast.com and just get in the search bar, do a search for Brian Page and find the podcasts that I’ve done with him here, and you’ll see the link to that calculator we were just talking about and you also see a link to the podcast, the Webinar that I’m going to be doing with him and you’ll get a transcript as well of this podcast.

Brian: Brian, appreciate the time… You’re a busy guy and I really appreciate you being here on the podcast, man. I really do. All right, well, hey, I appreciate being here, you having me here and it was a lot of fun and I hope I inspired some people. I hope people take action and go do this cause uh, it’s worth jumping in on.

Joe: It is exciting. I am excited. All right guys, we’ll see you later. Go, uh, go make some money. Make it happen. I’ll see you guys. Bye Bye.